The blog to end all blogs. Reviews and comments about all and everything. This blog is NOT affiliated with YouTube or any commercial vendor! Links don´t imply endorsement. Many posts and comments are ironic. The languages used are English and Swedish.

Friday, February 22, 2019

The Clymer Mystery

”The Divine
Mystery: The Inner Mystery” is a very peculiar tract on occultism written by
Reuben Swinburne Clymer (1878-1966), the founder of the small and somewhat mysterious
American Rosicrucian order FRC. The tract, originally published in 1910, consists
of two parts. The first is a heavily redacted and amended version of a famous work
on demonology, ”Demoniality, Or Incubi and Succubi” by 17th century Catholic clergyman
and inquisitor Ludovico Maria Sinistrari. The second is an extended summary and
exegesis of ”Pistis Sophia”, one of the few Gnostic texts known before the Nag Hammadi
finds.

Sinistrari´s
work was, of course, an attack on demons and people supposedly cavorting with them.
In Clymer´s version, however, the”demons” are really benevolent beings,
identical to the elementals discussed by Paracelsus and in the ”Comte de
Gabalis” by De Villars. Clymer explicitly mentions the latter work, first published
in 1670 and very influential for centuries (skeptics regard it as satire rather
than as a real occult work – but, then, that´s what they always say, isn´t it?).
Unfortunately, I haven´t read it – obviously, a serious lacuna in my
folkloristic knowledge! Or is it fakelore?

In the
mythological universe inherited by Clymer, the elementals – divided into gnomes,
sylphs, undines and salamanders–represent an alternative line of evolution to
that of humanity. Being made of one element only (for instance, gnomes are solely
made of the earth element), elementals cannot attain immortality…unless they have
sexual intercourse with humans! This explains the phenomenon of incubi and
succubi. In this version, however, the relationship is based on love and
resemble marriage. It´s not clear how sex between a spirit and a human is
possible at all. My impression is that Clymer believes that elementals can create
human-like bodies specially for the occasion. The point of the intercourse is
to harvest the missing elements from the human (thus, gnomes need water, fire
and air) and in this way transform themselves into more physical creatures which
can experience love, pain and suffering. Only in this way can the elemental be
saved by God or Christ.

Clymer claims
that Jesus was the product of sex between Mary and a salamander, i.e. a spirit
of fire. He also claims that the Nephilim mentioned in the Bible were products of
unions between male elementals and human females. Curiously for purely
spiritual creatures, the elementals are gendered! On this logic, the Watchers
and the Nephilim were really among the good guys. Clymer does believe in real
demons, as well. He calls them vampires since they suck the life out of their victims.
I wonder how the old inquisitor Sinistrari would have felt about this creative reinterpretation
of his hexenhammer…

As already mentioned,
the latter half of ”The Divine Mystery” is a summary of the ancient Gnostic
text ”Pistis Sophia”, which purportedly contains the secret teachings of Jesus
Christ only given to his closest disciples after his resurrection. Mary
Magdalene is counted among the initiated. The text contains all the usual cosmogonic
speculations of emanations, aeons, the fall of Sophia into matter, the descent of
the Savior through the spheres, and so on. The summary also deals with astral
bodies and similar themes. A weird trait is that ”Pistis Sophia” (and the
mission of Jesus) is said to be about the salvation of the White race. Clymer was
of course a White American, but his main source of inspiration, sex magician Paschal
Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), was mixed race and is today often regarded as
African-American!

It´s not
easy, based on this material, to understand what Clymer and the FRC are
*really* about. An interest in ritual magic is certainly present, and the
ultimate goal seems to be the Gnostic one of leaving evil matter behind and
evolve towards a much loftier spiritual station. On the other hand, an even stranger
companion work to this one, ”The Irreconcilable Gnomes”, seems to suggest that
the real goal is more physical and involves perfect control of the passions
here down below – something also hinted at in the frankly bizarre speculations about
sex and marriage with elemental spirits.